Isoperimetry on Manifolds with Ricci Bounded Below: Overview of Recent Results and Methods

We review recent results on the study of the isoperimetric problem on Riemannian manifolds with Ricci lower bounds. We focus on the validity of sharp second order differential inequalities satisfied by the isoperimetric profile of possibly noncompact Riemannian manifolds with Ricci lower bounds. We give a self-contained overview of the methods employed for the proof of such result, which exploit modern tools and ideas from nonsmooth geometry. The latter methods are needed for achieving the result even in the smooth setting. Next, we show applications of the differential inequalities of the isoperimetric profile, providing simplified proofs of: the sharp and rigid isoperimetric inequality on manifolds with nonnegative Ricci and Euclidean volume growth, existence of isoperimetric sets for large volumes on manifolds with nonnegative Ricci and Euclidean volume growth, the classical Lévy–Gromov isoperimetric inequality. On the way, we discuss relations of these results and methods with the existing literature, pointing out several open problems.